1. Field of the Invention
The invention disclosed and taught herein relates generally to management of remote power systems; and more specifically related to user managed power systems.
2. Description of the Related Art
A data center is a facility used for housing electronic equipment, typically a large number of computers, communications, and peripheral equipment. As the name implies, a data center is usually maintained by an organization for the purpose of handling the data necessary for its operations. A bank, for example, may have a data center, where all of its customers' account information is maintained and transactions involving these accounts are carried out. Practically every company that is mid-sized or larger has some kind of data center and larger companies often have dozens of data centers. Most large cities have many purpose-built data center buildings in secure locations close to telecommunications services.
A data center may occupy one room of a building, one or more floors, or an entire building. Most of the equipment is often in the form of servers organized in rack and/or cabinets, which are usually placed in single rows forming corridors between them. This allows people access to the front and rear of each cabinet. Servers differ greatly in size from 1U servers to huge storage silos that occupy many tiles on the floor. Some equipment such as mainframe computers, blade chassis and storage devices are often as big as the racks themselves, and are placed alongside them.
Communications in data centers today are most often based on networks running the Internet protocol (IP) suite. Data centers typically contain routers and switches that transport data traffic between the servers and the outside world. Redundancy is sometimes provided by sourcing the network connections from multiple vendors. Some of the servers at the data center are used for running the basic Internet and intranet services needed by internal users in the organization; such as email servers, proxy servers, DNS servers, etc. Network security elements are also usually deployed, such as firewalls, VPN gateways, Intrusion detection systems, etc. Also common are monitoring systems for the network and some of the applications. Additional offsite monitoring systems are also typical, in case of a failure of communications inside the data center.
Many IT and networking centers are experiencing higher load densities with more servers and components packed into racks and cabinets. This has created a clear need to monitor and manage the power supplied to each and all of these loads. IT and Facility Managers have the basic need to reliably and efficiently distribute power in the rack or cabinet to their networking equipment. There may be some differences depending on application and requirements these users have with respect to the functionality and connectivity of their devices. In general, these needs are classified by the capabilities of the physical device, its functional behavior, its network infrastructure and its software management models. Furthermore, market needs are addressed by certain expected product requirements.
Each data center is often equipped with controllable and configurable power strips. One such example is the MP Advanced power strip with OpenComms EM PDU. Another prior art example is the MP Advanced power strip with the MP Advanced Access Server. Both products are available from Liebert Corporation.
One of the more troublesome and risky practices in data centers occurs when a server or system locks up and a system administrator requests a power-off reboot. Ideally, the system administrator has individual access to the device and should be able to control the device directly, including power.
Previously all solutions have been hierarchical from the uninterruptible power supply (UPS) to the power distribution unit (PDU) to power strip to socket, and have been managed, installed, and controlled by data center staff. In a typical prior art system, such as a data center, there is an individual in charge of, for example, the email systems. There is also, generally, an individual in charge of all the Web servers. If the Web server administrator wishes to do Web page maintenance of some kind, such as reboot the Web server, the administrator typically calls in to the data center to request a reboot by the data center staff.
The present inventions are directed to improve methods and apparatuses allowing end users to manage power to their servers directly and more efficiently.